Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Night Watchman, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Power, Solidarity, and Community Action
Oppression and Supposed Good Intentions
Humor and Pain
Sex, Violence, and Gender
Agency and Exploitation
Summary
Analysis
The next day, when Mr. Vold sees what Thomas wrote on his time card about the owl, he interprets it as a cryptic joke. LaBatte plays along and offers an interpretation about Thomas smoking Snowy Owl brand cigars, but once he leaves Vold’s office, he stops laughing. If Thomas had seen an owl, LaBatte thinks, that would mean a death soon. He then shuffles through mental lists of who might die.
LaBatte interprets Thomas’s sighting of an owl, a bird that can hold significance in Chippewa culture, as an omen of death. Thomas’s inscription on his time card, though, makes any straightforward reading of the owl as a symbol in the novel difficult. While Mr. Vold attempts his own interpretation—and seems to widely miss the mark—later in the story the reader will find out that Thomas also recognizes the owl as a symbol, but doesn’t interpret it as superstitiously as he believes LaBatte does.
Themes
